Shadows (36 page)

“I doubt he could have come through your gate in his human form,” said Val.

The wolf bowed his head, but continued watching the man. The man looked familiar. . . . I crawled a little way toward him and Takahiro. This was a complicated maneuver, involving, as it did, the knapsack I was still wearing and a large traumatized dog chewing one of its straps while in my lap with his head under my shirt. I did it on two knees, one hand, and Mongo’s butt. “Oh, gods’ engines,” I said, horribly conscious of the huge wolf who was also Takahiro, “that’s Paolo. His wife works at Jill’s mom’s hairdresser’s shop. He’s the nicest of our local Watchguard.”

And now he was unconscious on the floor of some stupid horrible military warehouse thing and Val was in the same room wearing
chains.
And, oh by the way, my dog was having a nervous breakdown and my new boyfriend was in his wolf shape. I could feel a bubble of either tears or hysteria rising in my throat. I scooched Mongo a little farther so I could touch Paolo’s face. I could see he was breathing.

“He fainted,” said Val behind me. “He stood up from his desk when the—doorway you made opened, and fainted. You cannot blame him,” he added as if apologetically.

I didn’t blame him. I just wished none of this had happened. Well, duh. When Paolo’s wife had brought their two little kids to the shelter to pick out a dog a couple of years ago, I’d helped them choose. I saw them out walking Goldie sometimes.

I couldn’t deal. I was a senior in high school. I’d only just passed my driver’s test this summer. I’d be eighteen next month. There was no magic in Newworld, and the army were the good guys, keeping us safe.

I had to deal.

I looked at the desk. Maybe the key to the chains was in one of the drawers?

“The key will not be in the desk,” said Val.

I turned my head to glare at him. “Don’t
do
that,” I said. “This is—weird—enough.”

“I’m not doing anything,” said Val mildly. “It is an obvious thing to be thinking. But I am in chains because they are afraid of my magic, and because they don’t understand it they have some poor fellow in here with me, with a panic button to press if he is able to do so before my secret miasma of evil overcomes him. They will not have left the key with him.”

“Secret miasma of evil,” I said admiringly, but I knew I was stalling. I had no idea what to do next. But whatever it was . . . “Sweetie,” I said to Mongo’s butt, “do you suppose you might be ready to come out from there?”

I felt a familiar light pressure against the sole of one foot as I sat with my legs now folded under me. I felt behind me for my algebra book, and dragged it as gently as I could around to one side.

It flopped open at once, and presented one rigidly upstanding page, which again pulled free as easily as tearing a page off a memo pad. I looked at the little shred of paper lying on the floor that had fallen away from Mongo’s collar. Folding this new page on and around Mongo’s back was awkward but it so wanted to be folded I was barely keeping up with it. It was clearly a border collie, head down, tail straight out behind, intent as anything. Border collie
kami.

I felt around under my T-shirt for Mongo’s collar, and tucked it underneath. Then I wrapped both arms around him, put my face in his fur, and waited.

He came out looking embarrassed—gnawing on narrow chewy things like belts, long woolly scarves, shoes, coat sleeves, chair legs and knapsack straps had been one of the things I’d had the hardest time convincing him to
stop
doing, back in the days when he was learning to be a dog rather than a weapon of domestic demolition. He plastered himself belly-down on the floor and looked at me up through his eyelashes, judging how much trouble he was in. I reached out and curled the little paper collie another turn around his collar to make it more secure, and he immediately leaped up, licked my hand, licked my face, and then raced around the room twice while I tried to unfold my legs and find out if I could stand up. Ow. Sort of. When I bent over my algebra book again it flew open and another page presented itself, which I drew out softly.

I stood staring at it a minute. I held it stretched lightly between my two hands. I could vaguely see equations scrawled on it, tangled up in the leaf-vine flower-stem pattern of the ornamental paper. It was like one of those Can You Find? games in kids’ magazines. Here was a numeral two, which was also the little nobbly green thing that the petals of a flower unfurl from, and one of the petals of that flower was bent over in a square-root sign. I hadn’t noticed the bees before, which were also number eights, or maybe they were infinity signs.

“Maggie—” said Val, who was way too bright for his own good. My own good anyway.

“Shut up,” I said. “I mean, please don’t talk.”

I knelt (stiffly) down on the floor again. The algebra book immediately clunked over to lean against my hip and Mongo stopped cavorting like a loony and threw himself down on my other side. He had at least two
gruuaa
along for the ride: one of them climbed up my leg to tickle my forearm. Carefully I made the first fold. I wasn’t sure how many legs this one was going to need. . . . By the time my fingers couldn’t find anything left that wanted to be folded I had a thundering headache, and the many-legged, spiky-backed thing in my hands glittered like an oncoming migraine.

I stood up again, not realizing till then that I had developed a billowing, quivering
gruuaa
cape—I could see it, dark and dazzling, skittering out on either side of me. I wondered if Val might be seeing me now as I had seen him, that first night he came to dinner—in my old life, where things (mostly) made sense. I walked over to him and, wordlessly, he held his hands out toward me. There was a lock, unnervingly rather like a bicycle lock except for the little flashing lights that looked creepily like a tiny scowling red-eyed troll face, between his wrists. Now what? Don’t think about it. I grabbed one of Val’s hands and slapped my paper figure down on the troll face.

There was a brief, queasy, up-is-down-and-down-is-nowhere-and-I-really-hate-nowhere-here-we-are-again moment. There was a kind of whistling gasp, and then Val’s hands were holding onto my wrists, and he said, “Maggie!” I blinked, and I was standing in the awful little grey cement room at the back of the Goat Creek Military Base.

“Well done,” said Val, smiling faintly.

CHAPTER 13

I LOOKED DOWN (NOW THAT I KNEW WHERE DOWN was again). There, of course, was my algebra book, although it was half-buried in . . . “What?” I said. Whatever it was, it looked a little like the compost heap in Mom’s garden and a little like the remains of a fire in a ’tronic factory. “Ex-chains,” I said, kneeling to pick up my algebra book. “
Really
ex.”

“Really ex,” agreed Val, standing up cautiously.

I looked at my book. I had only used three pages, but better than two-thirds of it was gone. The covers were still there, still saying
Enhanced Algebra
in big stupid letters, and there were some pages left inside, but not many. Val was right: we weren’t leaving the way I had come in.

Val knelt beside Paolo, who hadn’t stirred. “Do you have a torch?”

I set my algebra book down on a clean part of the floor and wiggled out of my knapsack, fending Mongo away from helpless-person-lying-on-floor-
meant
-to-be-licked while I fished for my flashlight. Val finished taking Paolo’s pulse and then gently peeled his eyelids back one after the other and shone the light in them, gave the flashlight back to me, and ran his hands lightly over Paolo’s skull. Then he rolled him over tenderly in what I recognized as the recovery position from the yearly-once-you-reach-high-school required first-aid class. I’d only ever done any of this stuff on my classmates and even with them cooperating wrestling someone else’s body into any position was difficult. I wondered if there had been a lot of unconscious people in Val’s life in Orzaskan since it didn’t seem to faze him at all. “I guess he hit his head when he fell,” said Val. “But what I can easily check is all normal.” I went around to the chair behind the desk. There was a cushion on the seat, and a jacket over the back of it.

Val slid the cushion under Paolo’s head and I knelt to put the jacket over him. One of the things they taught us in first aid is that unconscious people can sometimes hear you. I awkwardly patted Paolo’s shoulder and said, “It’s me, Maggie. I’m sorry you hurt your head. I hope you’re okay.” I looked up at the wall opposite the desk. There was no trace of the gateway my little origami figure had opened.

Then Val and Takahiro and I turned toward the door. “We can’t just leave,” I said, and Val laughed. “Indeed, I doubt it,” he said.

“No,” I said, glaring at him. “Not like that. Well, worse,” I added reluctantly. “We also have to rescue Arnie.”

“Arnie?”

“Jill’s mom’s partner. He owns Porter’s—the hardware store.”

“Ironmongery,” said Val thoughtfully. “He is here too?”

“Well,” I said uncomfortably. “I hope so. You were.”

“Ah,” said Val. He put his hand on the doorknob. I held my breath. He turned it.

The door opened. I let my breath out.

Hix was around my neck again, but the rest of the
gruuaa
skittered out in front of us, turned right, and raced down the corridor like some bizarre tide. The corridor was only dimly lit and the
gruuaa
might almost have been black water, their leading edge ragged like it was pouring over pebbles, and occasionally splashing up the walls like they were piers. Val, Takahiro the wolf and I followed, me holding Mongo’s collar with one hand and my much thinner algebra book (it still wouldn’t fit in my knapsack) in the other arm. We passed two doors on one side and one on the other, but the
gruuaa
were still on the trail, so we followed. At last they piled up in front of a fourth door.

We stopped too. “I will go first,” said Val quietly.

“You will not,” I said, annoyed. “The minute anyone sees you, they’ll know something has gone wrong.”

“I feel that a seventeen-year-old girl in torn and bloody jeans will be just as easily recognized as not a standard member of staff,” said Val.

The army probably wasn’t into denim blood chic, no. I let go of Mongo and put my hand on the door and threw it open, planning to do some kind of heroic first thing, but Takahiro beat me to it: he was through the door in a flash. There was a kind of grunt like the noise you make when the breath is knocked out of you and a sort of strangled scream, and someone, probably the screamer, said, “Gods’ holy engines. Gods’
exploding
holy engines.”

I was through the door too before they’d finished saying it—a hundred-and-sixty-pound wolf is pretty worrying close up, and I didn’t want anyone doing anything radical. But Val nearly dislocated my shoulder when he grabbed me and jerked me back behind him—and Mongo got between most of our legs and we both almost fell down. Someone laughed.

“Arnie,” I said.

“Babe,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

It hadn’t been Arnie who screamed. He was the one who’d laughed. There was another man at another desk against another grey cement wall. This one was conscious, however. Conscious and standing up with his hands above his head like we were holding a gun on him. Sometimes I’m too dumb to live. I blurted out, “
You’re
the one with the gun.” I could see it on his belt, with a weeny little strap holding it in its holster.

“Oh, man,” he said. “I am
so
not going to shoot anyone.” But to my horror—and Val’s hands tightened, and Takahiro growled—the man lowered one hand and started fumbling with the strap. I hadn’t seen Taks crouch for the spring but I grabbed him anyway—Val’s hands on my shoulders meant I couldn’t reach very far, but I let go Mongo’s collar again and grabbed Taks’ tail and then I did see him
stop
crouching . . . at about the same moment as the man behind the desk got his gun free and laid it clumsily on the desk. It skidded a little way and stopped, barrel pointing back toward the man, who had both hands over his head again.

“All I wanted was a
job,
” said the man despairingly. He didn’t look much older than me. “And there aren’t many jobs around here, you know? And Paolo told me to try out for Watchguard, silverbugs are no big deal, and you spend most of your time walking little old ladies home anyway. Then there were all those silverbugs last summer, and suddenly we had the military crawling over us. . . . They’re reopening this place, Goat Creek, you know? They aren’t talking about it, but everyone knows they’re doing it.”

Not everyone, I thought. Bugsuck.

“I had
two hours’
training about use of a sidearm, okay? It was between how to step on a silverbug and how to fill out a form that you’ve stepped on a silverbug. I didn’t join Watchguard to shoot people. I joined to walk little old ladies home.”